If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Compatibility is an achievement of love; it shouldn't be its precondition. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“The more corrupt the community, the stronger the lure of individual achievement” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Let's make sure our ideas of success are our own, that we are truly the authors of our own ambitions.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The most unbearable thing about many successful people is not - as we flatteringly think - how lazy they are, but how… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“We are not always humiliated by failing at things; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
I passionately believe that's it's not just what you say that counts, it's also how you say it - that the success… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
It's great to get an 'F', but you also want to give the sense that there's something outside achievement. I've seen a… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The humanities have been forced to disguise, both from themselves and their students, why their subjects really matter, for the sake of… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
I've had my successes and failures. I know many academics in my field loathe me. I've come to loathe them back, as… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Far from rejecting outright any hierarchy of success or failure, philosophy instead reconfigures the judging process, lending legitimacy to theidea that themainstream… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Laughter is an important part of a good relationship. It's an immense achievement when you can move from your thinking that your… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Status Anxiety: A worry, so pernicious as to be capable of ruining extended stretches of our lives, that we are in danger… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“The business card does not fully reflect who we are. We are being judged, we feel, in a humiliating way. We feel… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“The essence of the charge made against the modern high-status ideal is that it is guilty of effecting a gigantic distortion of… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us enduring satisfaction. We are invited to imagine ourselves scaling… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
No one is able to produce a great work of art without experience, nor achieve a worldly position immediately, nor be a… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The pre-scientific age, whatever its deficiencies, had at least offered its members the peace of mind that follows from knowing all man-made… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“For the rest of history, for most of us, our bright promise will always fall short of being actualised; it will never… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
If optimism is important, it's because many outcomes are determined by how much of it we bring to the task. It is… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“To be mature is, we're told, to move beyond possessiveness. Jealousy is for babies. The mature person knows that no one owns anyone.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“He feared that by leaving her he would ruin her life - so he stayed, and did just that.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“The Anxiety of Sunday afternoon: your unlived lives and infinite possibility pressing upon the constraints of reality.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“We could not be fulfilled if we weren't inauthentic some of the time—inauthentic, that is, in relation to such things as our passing desires… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Insofar as we appreciate order, it is when we perceive it as being accompanied by complexity, when we feel that a variety of elements… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
I like the values associated with a medical family - common sense, being practical but also thoughtful. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Anyone who urgently needs us deserves, in the true book of love, to be our friend.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“We can then recognize that we invented religions to serve two central needs which continue to this day and which secular society has not… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Half the ingratitude and complacency in the world down to how slowly and imperceptibly most good and bad things unfold.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
